Changing parties, changing partisans: the personalization of partisan attachments in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands

"This paper investigates the effects of the deep transformations undergone by West European parties in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall fall on their relationship with the electorate. Attention is devoted in particular to the changing content of individuals' partisan attachments, which we hypothesize to have changed from a mere reflection of previous social and ideological identities to the result of individual attitudes towards parties and partisan objects. The main objective of this analysis is to show the nowadays prominent part played by voters' attitudes towards one of these 'objects' - party leaders - in determining psychological attachments with the parties. We concentrate on the main two cleavage-based parties in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands in the period between 1990 and the most recent election for which National Election Study data is available. By means of logistic regression analysis, it is shown the constantly declining ability of 'identity' items (e.g., social class, union membership, church attendance, region of residence) to predict individual feelings of partisan attachment, as well as the correspondingly growing part played by voters' attitudes towards issues, performance evaluation, and party leaders - the latter having become nowadays of crucial relevance in each country under analysis." (author's abstract

Evidence suggests that issues may have mattered more than expected in the 2016 US presidential elections

In the lead up to the 2016 election, many commentators argued that Donald Trump’s personality and actions would encourage many voters to cross party lines or to stay home. That was emphatically not the case, with Republicans generally voting for Trump as they would any other GOP candidate. Using data from a Voting Advice Application, Diego Garzia and Lorenzo Cicchi write that while partisanship was important in the election, their initial results show that policy issues – such as the repeal of Obamacare – were important to voters as well

Negativity and Political Behavior: A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Negative Voting in Contemporary Democracies

Published online: May 2022Recent developments in Western societies have motivated a growing consideration of the role of negativity in public opinion and political behavior research. In this article, we review the scant (and largely disconnected) scientific literature on negativity and political behavior, merging contributions from social psychology, public opinion, and electoral research, with a view on developing an integrated theoretical framework for the study of negative voting in contemporary democracies. We highlight that the tendency toward negative voting is driven by three partly overlapping components, namely, (1) an instrumental–rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms, (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities, and (3) an affective component, motivated by (negative) attitudes toward parties and candidates. By blueprinting the systematic relationships between negative voting and each of these components in turn, and suggesting multiple research paths, this article aims to stimulate future studies on negative voting in multi-party parliamentary systems to motivate a better understanding of the implications of negativity in voting behavior in contemporary democracies.This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (PCEFP1_186898)

Political polarization means more Americans are voting against rather than for candidates in presidential elections

Traditionally in elections people vote for candidates that they like. But in recent years, surveys have show a growing number of people cast their votes against candidates rather than for them – as many as one third in the 2020 election. In new research, Diego Garzia and Frederico Ferreira da Silva find that those who have a less positive feeling about the political party they usually identify with are more likely to vote against a presidential candidate compared to those who feel more strongly partisan

Allowing transnational voting during European elections could alleviate the EU’s democratic deficit

European Parliament elections are often criticised for lacking the required level of voter engagement to confer democratic legitimacy to the integration process. Jonathan Bright, Diego Garzia, Joseph Lacey and Alexander Trechsel assess whether ‘transnationalising’ European elections by allowing voters to back parties in other EU countries would help alleviate the problem. They argue that language barriers may represent a challenge, but suggest that internet-based ‘voting advice applications’ could help bridge this gap and offer a more representative range of choices to national electorates

Italy in times of protest and negative voting : an introduction

Published online: 10 November 2021The classic heuristics of voting behaviour have been eroded overtime especially in well-established democracies. Ideology, party identification, and social class have been gradually replaced by short-period factors. In particular, the personalization has represented an innovative variable that significantly contributes to explain voting behaviour. Cross-pressures between party identification, candidate assessments and issue preferences paved the way to the diffusion of protest voting, both against the élite and the system. In this respect, Italy represents a very interesting case from both a theoretical and an empirical point view considering the presence of protest parties and the important diffusion of anti-system movements which surfed the protest to consolidate their positions. The editors conceived this special issue aiming at analysing and measuring the impact of protest/negative voting in Italy between 2016 and 2020, a period in which protest parties and voters’ discontent have significantly increased. Data presented by the different papers confirm, albeit under different perspectives, the relevance of this peculiar form of political behaviour

The representative deficit in different European Party Systems: an analysis of the elections to the European Parliament 2009-2014

This paper explores the extent to which different party systems in Europe effectively represent their citizens. We argue that many European countries suffer from a “representative deficit”, which occurs when a significant portion of citizens have to vote for a political party whose stated views are actually quite different from their own. We measure the extent of this deficit in different European countries using data from EU Profiler and euandi, two Voting Advice Applications which served millions of users during the EP elections in 2009 and 2014 respectively. We find wide variation in the extent to which political parties are accurately tuned in to the preferences of their voters, a variation which is not clearly linked to the number of political parties or the proportionality of the electoral system. We attempt to explain some of this variation, and explore the reasons why some party systems offer better representation than others